“After the Cleveland Orchestra’s inaugural concert at Severance Hall on February 5, 1931, a Cleveland newspaper editorial stated: “We believe that Mr. Severance intended to build a temple to music and not a temple to wealth; and we believe it is his intention that all music lovers should be welcome there.” John Long Severance was the president of the Musical Arts Association from 1921-1936, and he and his wife Elisabeth donated most of the funds necessary to erect the magnificent building meant to be the permanent home of the Orchestra. Severance Hall was designed by Walker & Weeks with an elegant Georgian exterior that harmonized with the classical architecture of other prominent buildings in the
University Circle area. The interior of the building reflects a combination of design styles, including Art Deco, Egyptian Revival, Classicism, and Modernism. The landmark building was recognized as one of the most modern, up-to-date concert facilities in America when it opened in 1931”.

The Rock and Roll hall of Fame has become one of Cleveland’s most recognizable landmarks and a must see for out of town visitors. Here is a little information about the history of the Rock hall from the official website:

More than 25 years ago, leaders in the music industry joined together to establish the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation in New York City to celebrate the music and musicians that changed the world. With that, one of the Foundation’s many functions is to recognize the contributions of those who have had a significant impact on the evolution, development and perpetuation of rock and roll by inducting them into the Hall of Fame.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum opened its doors in 1995 on the shores of Lake Erie in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Inc. is a nonprofit organization that exists to engage, teach and inspire through the power of rock and roll. It carries out this mission through its operation of a world-class museum that collects, preserves, exhibits and interprets this art form and through its library and archives as well as its educational programs.

Officials from Cleveland and the state of Ohio approached the Foundation in 1985 and suggested the construction of a major museum. “We originally planned to purchase a brownstone in New York City in which to house the Hall of Fame, as well as an archive, library and museum,” said Suzan Evans. In November, the city sent a delegation to New York.

“They had these wonderful diagrams for a museum that would be much larger than any town house we had originally thought of,” said Evans. “Our eyebrows were raised, and somebody at the meeting actually passed me a note that said, ‘Pack your bags.’”

As the Foundation considered the offer, several other cities, including New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, San Francisco, Memphis and Chicago, also made offers. The board members visited each city and were greeted with police escorts, public rallies and marching bands.

The first induction dinner was held at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in January 1986. Inductees include Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers and Jimmy Yancey were honored as early influences. The first non-performers honored were producer Sam Phillips and disc jockey Alan Freed. Talent scout/producer John Hammond was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement award.

Meanwhile, Cleveland ranked first in a public poll conducted by USA Today asking where the Hall of Fame should be located. After much competition and many visits to potential sites by Foundation members, Cleveland is chosen as the permanent home for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in May of 1986.

Following an extensive search throughout 1987, world-renowned architect I.M. Pei was chosen to design the Museum. Pei had a lot of learning to do. “I didn’t know a thing about rock and roll,” he confessed.

Not to be discouraged the board members took Pei on trips to Memphis and New Orleans and to concerts in New York. “We heard a lot of music, and I finally got it: rock and roll is about energy,” said Pei. He accepted the challenge of designing the world’s first museum dedicated to rock and roll.

On June 7, 1993, ground was broken for the Museum in Cleveland. On hand were I.M. Pei and various board members, including Ahmet Ertegun, Suzan Evans and Jann Wenner. Inductees and other artists present at the ceremony included Pete Townshend, Chuck Berry, Billy Joel, Sam Phillips, Ruth Brown, Sam Moore of Sam and Dave, Carl Gardner of the Coasters and Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum.

Townshend made one of the museum’s significant donations on this occasion – the Gibson J-200 guitar used to compose Tommy, including the classic “Pinball Wizard.”

A year later, under a hot summer sun and Ruby, a larger-than-life inflatable from the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels tour, the Museum was topped off with the last steel beam in its structure. First-year inductee Jerry Lee Lewis, as well as several Cleveland musicians, performed for a crowd that includes Pei, Wenner, Evans and Ertegun.

On October 13, 1994, Yoko Ono presented a major collection of John Lennon artifacts to the Museum. The collection included lyrics, Lennon’s guitar from the 1965 Beatles concert at Shea Stadium, a pair of eyeglasses and the leather jacket Lennon wore while in Hamburg.

In September of 1995 and after 12 years in the making, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum opened with a full schedule of events.

On the first day, September 1, the celebration began with a playful parade through the streets of Cleveland, followed by a ribbon-cutting ceremony in front of the Museum. Present for the ceremony were Pei, Ertegun, Wenner, Evans, Ohio Governor George Voinovich, Cleveland Mayor Michael White, Little Richard and Yoko Ono, as well as press from around the world. A gala private dinner attended by board members, celebrities and many Cleveland residents ended the evening in grand style.

The Museum officially opened to the public on Saturday, September 2, which kicked off with a ceremony presenting the Ahmet M. Ertegun Exhibition Hall, the Museum’s main exhibit space named in recognition of the founder of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Since the Museum’s opening, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum has welcomed nearly eight million visitors from around the world and reaches more than 50,000 students and educators each year through its education programs on site and at great distances.

– Take a moment to find out more about this cool museum: http://www.rockhall.com/

Today’s photo is of the Fountain of Wisdom located in the Hebrew Cultural Garden in Cleveland.

From the Cleveland Cultural Gardens website:

“The Hebrew Garden was designed by T. Ashburton Tripp and was the first garden in what was to become the Cultural Gardens. Dedicated in 1926, it is a monument to the Zionist movement, as well as the vision of Leo Weidenthal, who was instrumental in the founding of the Cultural Gardens chain, or Poets’ Corners as he originally named it. The Garden is laid out with the sandstone walk forming a Star or Shield of David, six pointed star, around the Wisdom fountain which echoes the star with six sides and points. To the right or north is a rock garden or poets’ corner. To the left a lyre or harp shaped Musicians area. Beyond the rock garden, to the right or north are a series of boulders with plaques and beyond is the B’nai Brith memorial.Jewish Federation of Cleveland sponsors the Hebrew Cultural Garden through its Hebrew Cultural Garden committee”.

“GuitarMania® is a Greater Cleveland community public art project that has raised $2 million for its two benefiting charities – United Way of Greater Cleveland and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’s education programs. The project consists of large, 10-ft-tall Fender® Stratocaster® guitars creatively transformed into works of art by local artists and national celebrities. The guitars are displayed on the city streets of Cleveland for residents and visitors to enjoy from the end of May through October, 2012. Corporations, organizations and individuals sponsor the guitars and select from a variety of local artists to paint, sculpt or decorate them. Celebrity artists also paint and decorate guitars.”

Did you know that Cleveland was originally spelled “Cleaveland,” named after General Moses Cleaveland. The “a” was dropped so that the name could fit into a newspaper’s masthead. For more cool fact about Cleveland check out the Citiview Cleveland website: http://citiviewcleveland.com/

Today’s Cleveland photo is of the Dante Alighieri statue that was dedicated in the Italian Garden of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens on June 29, 2012. Here is some more information about Dante from Wikipedia: “Durante degli Alighieri, simply referred to as Dante, was a major Italian poet of the Middle Ages. His Divine Comedy, originally called Commedia and later called Divina by Boccaccio, is widely considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature”.

From Wikipedia: “Wade Park is a park in the University Circle neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. An idyllic swath of land in one of Cleveland’s busiest neighborhoods, the park was built on land donated by Jeptha Wade with the intention of using part of the property building for an art museum. Its most prominent feature is the Cleveland Museum of Art and the adjacent Wade Park Lagoon. While not technically a historical landmark on its own, the park falls within the eponymous Wade Park historical district and essentially serves the landscape for most of the buildings included in the registry entry.

Established on the land donated to the city by Jeptha Wade in 1882, Wade Park today largely serves as a museum campus for the Cleveland Museum of Art, as well as several other Cleveland cultural institutions. One of the most prominent features of the park — and of University Circle — is the Wade Lagoon. The lagoon is situated on the south end of Wade Park, in front of the museum. Bounded by East Boulevard on the west, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive on the east and Euclid Avenue on the south, the lagoon provides a tranquil retreat as well as a home for fish, which are mainly ornamental koi.”

Today’s Cleveland photo is of the Peter B. Lewis Building in Cleveland, Oh.

From the Case Western Reserve Website:

About the Building:

The home of the Weatherhead School of Management is the Frank Gehry-designed Peter B. Lewis Building. The Lewis Building reflects the spirit of Weatherhead’s innovative approach and clearly places Weatherhead in the vanguard of business education. It redefines the way a business school should look, just as Weatherhead redefines the way management education should be taught.

About Peter B. Lewis:

In 1965, in one of the first leveraged buyouts in history, Peter B. Lewis took control of his family’s 100-employee Cleveland insurance company. His radical idea: insure drivers no other company would touch. Forty years later, he is Chairman of the Progressive Corporation, the nation’s third largest auto insurer with 27,000 employees and sales of $13.4 billion. In 1999, Mr. Lewis donated $36.9 million to the Weatherhead School for the building that bears his name – the most recent gift in a series of contributions to Case Western Reserve University honoring four generations of the Lewis family who have attended the University.

From About.com: “Clevelands Little Italy neighborhood, located on Mayfield Road, just south of Euclid Ave., grew up in the late 19th century, fueled by scores of immigrants that came to the area to work as stone-cutters for nearby Lake View Cemetery and to work in clothing factories.

Early residents included Joseph Carabelli, who donated the land for Holy Rosary Church and helped to found Alta House, a charitable organization that still thrives.

Today, Clevelanders of Italian descent are located all over the city, but Little Italy retains that “Old World” flavor with restaurants, art galleries, and the popular “Feast of the Assumption” festival each August”.

From Cleveland.com: “In a way that’s palpable but hard to measure, Cleveland just became a better place to live, thanks to the completion of the new central atrium at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

This grand interior space — nearly as big as a football field — was intended by New York architect Rafael Viñoly to be the centerpiece of the $350 million expansion and renovation he designed for the museum a decade ago.

Now it has the chance to do that job, and much more.

The atrium opened at 10 a.m. Tuesday without fanfare, seven years after construction began at the museum and four years after the new and renovated galleries started opening. Director David Franklin and several staff members waited quietly in the low and shadowy North Lobby as the first visitors trickled past them to enter the atrium.

They gazed up, open-mouthed, at the skylight high overhead and slowed down to take in the surrounding architecture, which includes the restored north facade of the museum’s white marble 1916 building, plus Viñoly’s glass, wood and metal gallery and office areas, which will wrap the other three sides of the space when they’re complete.”